Sep 7, 2012

We've been writing on and off about Intel's upcoming CPU line, codenamed Haswell, the one that will succeed Ivy Bridge in 2013, and it may be time for a synthesis of what we haven't analyzed too deeply yet.

We already know that the TDP of the processors will go as low as 10 Watts, but that's only for ultrabooks and other mobile PCs. This time we are looking at the Xeon E3-1200 v3 line, the so-called Denlow platform, which will be used in servers, workstations, low-power applications and Virtual Hosted Desktops (VHD). We've counted nine so far, and we aren't the only ones. Their thermal design power ranges from 15 to 95 Watts and the cache from 3 to 8 MB. That last part isn't quite true though. All processors use 8 MB cache, save for one, a dual-core (4-thread) for the low power market, which has 3 MB but the lowest TDP of them all (12-20W). But we're getting ahead of ourselves. We'll take the VHD chips first, then the low-power, then the workstation units and, finally, the server Xeon Haswell processors.

There are two VHD models, with four cores and eight threads each. Both have integrated graphics enabled but their TDPs are of 95W and 65W. Moving up, there are three low-power chips. Other than the aforementioned dual-core (with no GPU), there are two quad-cores, only one of which has integrated graphics and, thus, needs more energy than the other (45W TDP compared to 25-30W). The workstation units are, once again, two. They are quad-core, 8-thread models nearly identical, even in power requirements (95W), but one has integrated graphics disabled. As for the quad-core, 8-thread server chips, they both lack graphics and consume 80W and 95W, respectively.

All CPUs will have up to 2 DDR3 or DDR3L DIMMs per channel, new AVX instructions (AVX 2.0) and integrated voltage regulators.